Are The Polls Right?

Going Down? If the polls were a little black box, Labourites would be forever tapping it with their middle finger, giving it a none-too-gentle shake, and muttering: "There's something wrong with this bloody machine - because that can't be right!"

CAN THE GOVERNMENT really be so far ahead of Labour in the polls? Is it credible that voter support for the National Party is consistently calculated at more than 50 percent?

Labour supporters certainly don’t think so. If the polls were a little black box, Labourites would forever be tapping at it with their middle finger, or giving it a none-too-gentle shake. Re-reading the dial they’d mutter angrily: "There’s something wrong with this bloody machine – because that can’t be right", and throw it forcefully against the nearest wall.

But, this sort of denial only makes things worse. If there’s one thing in this world upon which it is still safe to rely – it’s mathematics. If three or four independent polling agencies, each one conducting its survey at different times and using its own idiosyncratic selection and weighting formulae have, for two years straight, produced results within a very few percentage points their rivals – then those results should be heeded.

Rather than insisting there’s something wrong with the polling agencies’ little black boxes, Labour should be devoting its energies to understanding the data. Phil Goff needs to understand why John Key’s government is so popular. Only then can the Labour Party begin making it unpopular.

A major obstacle to achieving such understanding is the historical record. Labour’s strategists look back over more than a century of election results and find only a handful of occasions where a single political party received more than 50 percent of the popular vote.

These were the elections of 1938, 1946, 1949 and 1951. All of those contests were classic First-Past-the-Post, two-party, elections in which 95 percent or more of the popular vote was shared between Labour and National. Since the election of 1954, when the Social Credit Political League debuted with an impressive 11.4 percent share of the votes cast, neither National nor Labour has ever won more than half of the electorate’s support.

It is highly improbable, Labour’s strategists insist, that the National Party, operating under a system of proportional representation and with six other parties holding seats in the House of Representatives, could take more than 50 percent of the Party Vote.

Improbable – but not impossible.

Deductive reasoning has its place, but it is not always true that simply because something has never happened in the past (or, at least, for a very long time) it cannot, therefore, happen in the future. Just ask Barack Obama.

If a set of conditions have come into existence between 2006 and 2011 – conditions that were not present when past general elections were conducted – then it is entirely reasonable to argue that this year’s general election will produce an outcome none of us have ever seen before.

What could those conditions be?

One of them might be an unwillingness, on the electorate’s part, to go on believing that governments can act outside the parameters of global capitalist norms without making a bad situation even worse. In a nation as small and economically vulnerable as New Zealand, such scepticism is likely to be well-founded. And, in circumstances where that nation is required to borrow $260 million per week, just to pay its bills, then scepticism is well on the way to becoming fact.

New Zealanders look abroad and witness the dire economic crises afflicting Greece and Ireland: they see the violent political consequences of the austerity measures forced upon those bankrupt countries’ governments; and they are hugely relieved that their Prime Minister made his millions negotiating the rapids of global finance.

In the absence of a Labour leader, and a Labour Party manifesto, sufficiently persuasive to negate John Key’s experiential advantages, why would New Zealanders vote for anybody else?

It will require a campaign of historic and heroic dynamism to jolt New Zealanders out of their fatalistic certitude that nothing can be done to protect their country from the ravages of a devastating global recession. And, since a period of economic austerity is now inevitable, who’s better placed to manage the whole painful process than our own, highly successful, former currency trader from Merrill Lynch?

Labour cannot count on the news media delivering, uncritically, any policy prescription fundamentally at odds with these dispiriting conclusions. Which leaves the Opposition Leader Goff with just two options.

If he’s unwilling to challenge the conventions of contemporary politics (in which the mainstream news media plays a crucial role) he’ll have to run what The Daily Show’s host, John Stewart, calls a "We suck the least" style of election campaign.

Or, if Mr Goff wishes to offer the voters something more than "A Kinder, Gentler Austerity Programme", he’s going to have to display a talent for radical-populist political mobilisation hitherto undetected in either himself or his caucus.

Accordingly, the chances of National’s stratospheric poll results proving anything other than prophetic seem rather slim.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 January 2011.